Andrew Noren

Jonas Mekas assembles 160 portraits, appearances, and fleeting sketches of underground and independent filmmakers captured between 1955 and 1996. Fast-paced and archival in spirit, the film celebrates the avant-garde as its own “nation of cinema,” a vital community existing outside the dominance of commercial film.

A brief excerpt from Huge Pupils that has been shown on its own. Portrait of filmmaker Ernie Gehr shown at FIAF's Symposium on the Importance of Non-Industrial Cinema Within Our Cultural Heritage in 1984.

"Intuitive conjuring and orchestration of retinal phantoms, refined by abstraction into music for light and mind. Light, both wave and particle, alive and moving, making shadow and, therefore, time."

Home movies shot on Super 8mm by W+B Hein over 10 years.

Energy pictures; mindful kinesis. Light and shadow vigorously conjoin, conjuring delusion of depth and duration, fiction of space and time. The fool’s paradise of the illusory window is savored and shattered and seen for what it is.

In 1968, Noren finished Huge Pupils, a gorgeous, sensuous, sexually outrageous visual study of his daily life, and part I of an ongoing series he would come to call The Adventures of the Exquisite Corpse.

Charmed Particles is a physics term... it describes the point at which energy becomes matter, intangible ‘nothing’ becoming, somehow, ‘something.’ What lies at the heart of each atom is nothing... the beast at the heart of the labyrinth... and from that nothing comes the something we call the world. Being emanates from nothing, and vice versa. Oldest question in the world: "Why is there something rather than nothing?"

A meditation on the winter light flowing through two windows, as it is modulated and transformed by the window curtains blowing in the breeze.

"A double projection of buildings exploding in slow motion, in forward and reverse, that 'was intended as mantra, to run perpetually, viewer to enter/leave at any point." - Scott MacDonald

Ghost pictures from the "other" world, which is this world. The ghost is in love, at work, at play with bright companions. Flutter of phantoms, trick of light, sleight of the eye. A comedy of mirrors. Love advice from the grave... remember you must die.

Lost film featuring vignettes of individual couples in a bathtub

An aging, but still lovely woman in New York shoots her last shot and misses. Death is fingered as the last romantic. The devil dies of fantastic, horrible boredom. God toys with atheism, and is disappointed. Memory, desire, love, hate, life and death, reality and illusion incredibly fucked up and entangled. How an awful angel of death bites our respective clits and cops our respective heads accordingly and how he makes is bleed and how we like it and ask for more and how he gives us more and how he fucks us in our poor asses just as we bend over to pick up the Jew-Fat soap bar of love, and how we shriek and squeal and the feathers fall like blacksnow, and how he calls it love and how we believe him, and how it all turns out to be too true." Canyon Cinema Catalog #2

"Reverberation began as an attempt at a portrayal, a representing of a life situation by way of film, and turned in the making of it into a presentation of the physical movement of film itself, stranding the photo-memory of persons/objects/their relationships in a cinematic force-field wherein images are offered up and simultaneously swept away by conflicting energies. Sound as it comes from a speaker has its own quality. No matter how close it comes in reproducing sound of living beings or objects, this quality is always the sound of the projector, the wires, the tubes and the speakers. This is its actuality. And it can be heard and experienced as sound, a form of energy." -Ernie Gehr

Noren's first film is a Godard-inspired experimental narrative that was lost in a fire in 1970

"Fifteen focumentaries, each about two minutes long, each about some common thing: talking eating, the morning shits, the afternoon fucks with the light coming in, listening to music, getting stoned, singing, etc. Some fantastic crippled beggars doing their routines on 14th St. Several portraits of people. All of them were shot with live sound. This film will go on forever." - Canyon Cinema Catalog #2

GROUP VII: PORTRAIT OF DIANA (1970, 4 min, 16mm, silent) PORTRAIT OF ANDREW NOREN (1972, 4 min, 16mm, silent) These films are personal light portraits. I consider them unique and beautiful.

"Single-take, 100-foot rolls of 16mm film in which Noren documented 'absolutely every aspect of my life.'" - Scott MacDonald

The only film that remains from Noren's early period. "a thirty-minute, single-shot interrogation of an actress/character that hovers between documentary and fiction" - Scott MacDonald

A series of eight portraits. Lost in a fire in 1970

“Cinema isn’t materials…it is refined, imaginative seeing…darkness made visible…[it] existed long before modern devices, since the first opening of the first animal eyelid…scene one, take one.... We invent the world as we are seeing it. Anything can happen” (Andrew Noren)